"Phantasy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... visible, and there was presented to the eye an unbroken expanse of salt bush. It was unbroken but for the mirage that quivered in the dry, hot air. The lake of shining water, with the ferns and trees reflected in it, was but a phantasy, and the girl who leaned idly against the door-post of the hut knew it. Still she looked at it wistfully—it had been so hot, so cruelly hot, this burning January day, and in all the wide plain that stretched away for miles on every side there was not a particle ...
— The Moving Finger • Mary Gaunt
... said, pleased her very much, as a phantasy. Of course it was only a pleasant fancy. She herself knew too well the actuality of humanity, its hideous actuality. She knew it could not disappear so cleanly and conveniently. It had a long way to go yet, a long and hideous way. Her subtle, ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... of them; and papa—and, to say the truth, I myself—would so very much prefer your reading the preface first, that you must try to indulge us in our phantasy. The book Mr. Bentley half promises to finish the printing of this week. At any rate it is likely to be all done in the next: and you may depend upon having a copy as soon as I have ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... its dancing arms, he sent his love to a lady of long ago whom he called by the sweetest of names, not knowing in his innocence that the little white birds are the birds that never have a mother. I wished (so had the phantasy of Timothy taken possession of me) that before he went he could have played once in the Kensington Gardens, and have ridden on the fallen trees, calling gloriously to me to look; that he could have sailed one paper-galleon ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... would assist me, under any circumstances, in a personal contest with his master. I made no doubt that the latter had been infected with some of the innumerable Southern superstitions about money buried, and that his phantasy had received confirmation by the finding of the scarabus, or, perhaps, by Jupiter's obstinacy in maintaining it to be "a bug of real gold." A mind disposed to lunacy would readily be led away by such suggestions—especially if chiming in ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... ironical solemnity; while, with the other, he could be overwhelmed by the immemorial panoply of royalty, and, thrilling with the sense of his own strange elevation, dream himself into a gorgeous phantasy of crowns and powers and chivalric love. When he told Victoria that "during a somewhat romantic and imaginative life, nothing has ever occurred to him so interesting as this confidential correspondence with one so exalted and so inspiring," was ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... history, representing the human emphasis, with the study of geography, representing the natural, is ignored, history sinks to a listing of dates with an appended inventory of events, labeled "important"; or else it becomes a literary phantasy—for in purely literary history the natural environment is ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... to be wondered at. I told her, if she would consider her honor and the sequel thereof, she would, considering her years, make suit to your grace to have one, rather than to make delay to be without one one hour. She cannot digest such advice in no way; but if I should say my phantasy, it were more meet she should have two than one. She would in any wise write to your grace, wherein I offered her my advice, which she would in no wise follow, but write her own phantasy. She beginneth now a little to droop, by reason she heareth that my lord-admiral's ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... I talk of dreams, 'Which are the children of an idle brain Begot of nothing but vain phantasy." —Romeo ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... 'Hope is not born of earth, or it were perishable. Rather know her the offspring of that embrace strong love straineth the heavens with. This owe we to thy music, bridal nightingale! And the difference of this celestial spirit from the smirking phantasy of whom all stand soon or late forsaken, is the difference between painted day with its poor ambitious snares, and night lifting its myriad tapers round the throne of the eternal, the prophet stars of everlasting time! And the one dieth, and the other liveth; and the one is unregretted, and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... trunk a growth Of intertwisted fibres serpentine, Up coiling and inveterately convolved, Nor uninformed with Phantasy, and looks That threaten ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... the subtle influence of the moonlight and the night that awoke all the young fires of dreaming, she half closed her eyes and seemed to see a woman who looked like herself yet who—in the phantasy of that moment—was arrayed in a gown of silk and small satin slippers, looking up into the eyes of a man whose hair was dark and whose chin was cleft and whose smile flashed upon white teeth. Only ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... luminous illustration of the other. There is a note you will find common to her grandiose schemes of territorial expansion, of intellectual enlightenment and domestic reform. It is the note of theatricality, of extravagance, of excess. The strangest chimeric phantasy sometimes here possesses her, hitherto prosaic enough in so many ways; and it communicates itself to men like the Orloffs, Patiomkin, Suvaroff. It is, I think, M. Leroy-Beaulieu, who remarks that in Russia the shows of things are more important ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... a sorcerer had stamped his foot, a hundred wretched creatures, mostly women and children, seemed to spring up from the ground. It was like a phantasy. They gathered about the prostrate woman, laughing and jeering. A policeman who was standing at the corner a little way off came up leisurely, and pushing the motley crew aside, looked down ...
— Cast Adrift • T. S. Arthur
... say to me, 'Let the girl go home; let us see if we hear more of her. If this be but a phantasy on her part; if she has been fasting and praying and dreaming, till she knows not what is true and what is her own imagining, why, time will cure her of her fancies and follies. If otherwise—well, ...
— A Heroine of France • Evelyn Everett-Green
... eye with emerald; there was quarried the horse-block from which dark Care leaped into the saddle behind the rider; there were puffed out the smoke-wreaths of Doubt; there were blown the bubbles of Phantasy; there sprouted the seeds of Madness; and there, down in the icy vaults, Death froze his finger ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... what men call Divinity, is only the product of their phantasy, of a psychological aberration. It is not Divinity that has created man, but man who creates Divinity in his own image. In God man only adores his own being. God is only a fiction, but a very harmful fiction. ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... of thought profound, When Memory's heart, depress'd with gloom, Laments upon the sculptured mound, And dreams beside the visioned tomb; When voices from the dead arise, Like music o'er the starlit sea, And holiest commune sanctifies The Hour of Phantasy. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 482, March 26, 1831 • Various
... Dublin in February, 1882. Stephens was discovered in an office and saved from clerical slavery by George Russell ("A. E."). Always a poet, Stephens's most poetic moments are in his highly-colored prose. And yet, although the finest of his novels, The Crock of Gold (1912), contains more wild phantasy and quaint imagery than all his volumes of verse, his Insurrections (1909) and The Hill of Vision (1912) reveal a rebellious spirit that is at once hotly ironic and ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... historique qui se fanera le premier. . . . Dans 146 ans, Sir Walter Scott ne sera pas a la hauteur ou Corneille nous apparait 146 ans apres sa mort." "To write a modern romance of chivalry." says Jeffrey, in his review of "Marmion" in the Edinburgh, "seems to be much such a phantasy as to build a modern abbey or an English pagoda. . . . [Scott's] genius, seconded by the omnipotence of fashion, has brought chivalry again into temporary favor. Fine ladies and gentlemen now talk, indeed, of donjons, keeps, tabards, 'scutcheons, tressures, caps ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... the second Intelligence. It represents that state of the soul in which it receives things from the senses. The senses impress the forms of objects upon the imagination ([Greek: phantasia]) which is in the front part of the head. The imagination, or phantasy, takes them to the rational soul. When the latter knows them, she becomes identical with them ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... backgrounds of their lacquered landscapes. It reveals itself everywhere, close to and on the horizon, modifying at its pleasure the colour of things, and giving them a kind of metallic lustre. The phantasy of its changes is unimaginable. Even in the distances of the countryside, it is busy indicating by little trailing clouds of gold the smallest ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... phenomena, oftener in the creation of mighty abstractions; and the moral of all must be set forth in the burden of 'The Daughter of Lebanon,' that 'God may give by seeming to refuse.' Prose-poems, as they have been called, they are deeply philosophical, presenting under the guise of phantasy the profoundest laws of the working of the human spirit in its most terrible disciplines, and asserting for the darkest phenomena of human life some compensating elements as awakeners of hope and fear and awe. The sense of a great pariah world is ever present ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... has its peculiar folly; some scheme, project, or phantasy into which it plunges, spurred on either by the love of gain, the necessity of excitement, or the mere force of imitation. Failing in these, it has some madness, to which it is goaded by political or religious causes, or both combined. Every one of these causes influenced the Crusades, and conspired ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... perceived that this artist, in place of giving body to his phantasy in porphyry and marble, or defining his thoughts by the creation of massive caryatides, rather effaced the contour of his works, and, had it been necessary, could have elevated his architecture itself from the soil, to suspend it, like the floating palaces of the Fata Morgana, ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... utterance. We know that what we see is but a sort of intellectual Siamese twins, of which one is substance and the other shadow, but we cannot set either free without killing both. We are unable to rudely tear away the veil of phantasy in which the truth is shrouded, so we present the reader with a draped figure, and his own judgment must discriminate between the clothes and the body. A truth's prosperity is like a jest's, it lies in the ear of him that hears it. Some may see our lucubration ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler
... home together, and in the empty street that led into her square a moonlight spirit of phantasy seemed to possess her, and she sang under her breath and danced in front of him, rather solemnly as she had done as ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... he thought of it; yes, his hair lifted and his lip twitched involuntarily, for to Adrian's racked nerves and distorted vision this ghost of the good man whom he had betrayed was no child of phantasy. He had woken in the night and seen it standing at his bedside, plague-defiled and hunger-wasted, and because of it he dreaded to sleep alone, especially in that creaking, rat-haunted mill, whose very board seemed charged with some tale of death and blood. Heavens! At this very moment ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... dreams, Which are the children of an idle brain, Begot of nothing but vain phantasy, Which is as thin of substance as the air, And ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... that she had betrayed her secret, the pent up tide of her phantasy rushed to the door. She was reckless. Used to everything her own way, knowing nothing of disappointment, a new and ill understood passion dominating her, she let everything go and the torrent sweep her with it. Passion, like a lovely wild beast, had mastered her, and she never thought ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... throughout, to show that those and other like matters, which had been introduced at the Trials, as proofs of spectral agency, were easily resolvable into the visions and vagaries of a "deluded imagination," "a phantasy in the ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... this she-creature, plumed And poised in air? Iris-illumed, She gleams, in borrowed glory, A portent of modernity, Out-marvelling strangest phantasy That chequered classic story. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, May 14, 1892 • Various
... latterly, as much as the work had. Careless Roland saw no way out of that difficulty, any more than he did out of the other, except by an emigration to that desired haven which had stereotyped itself on the retina of his imagination in colours of the brightest phantasy—Port Natal. For its own sake, Roland was hurrying to get to it, as well as that it might be ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... too nice," exclaimed Tom, "upon the point of honour, as you call it. Her engagement I look upon as a mere phantasy, which she will be convinced of ere long. All you have to consider is, whether or not she will accept you. You have had no answer from her you say; then take an early opportunity of seeing her, and pressing for a reply. If you will not plead for yourself ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... does not see itself, because sight itself is neither body nor that which is colored. Hence it does not revert to itself. Neither therefore is this the case with any other irrational nature. For neither does the phantasy project a type of itself, but of that which is sensible, as for instance of colored body. Nor does irrational appetite desire itself, but aspires after a certain object of desire, such as honor, or pleasure, or riches. It does ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... the world. Not only the goods and truths, stored up in the memory, remain and return, but likewise all the states of innocence and charity; and when states of evil and the false, or of wickedness and phantasy recur, these latter states are attempered by the former through the Divine ...
— The Gist of Swedenborg • Emanuel Swedenborg
... pall-like canopy above. In each of the angles of the chamber stood on end a gigantic sarcophagus of black granite, from the tombs of the kings over against Luxor, with their aged lids full of immemorial sculpture. But in the draping of the apartment lay, alas! the chief phantasy of all. The lofty walls, gigantic in height—even unproportionably so—were hung from summit to foot, in vast folds, with a heavy and massive-looking tapestry—tapestry of a material which was found alike as a carpet on the floor, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... him, and at one time had great expectations concerning his genius. His paper, published in The Dial, under the title of "The Two Dolons," was much admired by some of the Transcendentalists when it was printed there; and it is referred to by Hawthorne in his "Hall of Phantasy." In June, 1842, Emerson wrote to Margaret Fuller: "I wish you to know that I have 'Dolon' in black and white, and that I account Charles N. a true genius; his writing fills me with joy, so simple, so subtle, and so strong is it. There are sentences ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... palms—had stamped scenes and sounds with immortality, yet thrilled him with the indefinite sense of unreality and dread one feels in scanning the lineaments of the beloved dead? Had her nervous folly infected him? What absurd phantasy was hers, and what ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... damp The fuel that was stored within; which lay Unlighted, waiting for the tinder-touch, Until a chance spark fall'n from Lucia's eyes Kindled the fuel, and the fire was love: Not such as rises blown upon the wind, Goaded to flame by gusts of phantasy, But still, and needing no replenishment, Unquenchable, that would ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... Britain undoubtedly owes much to Celtic phantasy. Of this Chaucer, at any rate, had ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... libretto, from the mediaeval romance of Huon of Bordeaux. The scenes are laid in fairy-land, and it may be almost called a German "Midsummer-Night's Dream," though the story differs widely from the charming phantasy of our own Shakespeare. The opera of "Oberon" was written for Kemble, of the Covent Garden theatre, in London, and was produced by Weber under circumstances of failing health and great mental depression. The composer pressed every energy to the utmost to meet his ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... height of this imaginary turmoil, he awoke, and conceived for a few moments that certain sounds which rang in his ears, were the continuation of those of his dream, in that sort of half-consciousness between sleeping and waking, when reality and phantasy meet and mingle in dim and confused resemblance. He was, however, very soon fully awake to the fact of his guards calling on him to arm, which he did in haste, and beheld the machine in flames, and a furious conflict raging around it. He hurried ...
— Maid Marian • Thomas Love Peacock
... railroading so large a portion of the young women to Hell? What causes so many to forsake the "straight and narrow path" that is supposed to lead to everlasting life, and seek the irremediable way of eternal death? What mad phantasy is it that leads so many wives to sacrifice the honor of their husbands and shame their children? Is it evil inherent in the daughters of Eve themselves? Is it lawless lust or force of circumstances that adds legion after legion ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... an impossible thought, Fraeulein. If you but knew who the lady is, you would understand that such a hope on my part were a phantasy. But I have no such hope or wish. I do not now want to win the lady of ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... sights, which may be smiled at in our studies, and curiously analyzed in our scientific alembics, but cannot be ignored in practice without the occurrence of dire catastrophes, and the unpleasant realization of the truth that idealism, phantasy, and vision may be transformed into dangerous forms of force. It may be said, indeed, that the appropriate motto of the medical ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... man, with large, gray eyes, And a pale face, that seemed undoubtedly As if a blooming face it ought to be; Heavy his low-hung lip did oft appear, Depressed by weight of moving phantasy; Profound his forehead was, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... of sirens, pledges of heaven's joy Sphere-born harmonious sisters, Voice and Verse, Wed your divine sounds, and mixed power employ— Dead things with inbreathed sense able to pierce— And to our high-raised phantasy present That undisturbed song of pure concent[105] Aye sung before the sapphire-coloured throne To him that sits thereon, With saintly shout, and solemn jubilee; Where the bright seraphim, in burning row, Their loud uplifted angel trumpets blow; And the ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... thy trances pale. But he is gazing on the moonlit brow Of his dead Agathe, and fondly now, The light is silvering her bloodless face And the cold grave-clothes. There is loveliness As in a marble image, very bright! But stricken with a phantasy of light That is not given to the mortal hue, To life and breathing beauty: and she too Is more of the expressless lineament, Than of the golden thoughts that came and went Over her features like a ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart
... liquidation of indebtedness—can be covered by the singular verdict of noncriminality which our author has pronounced. He, of course, knows much better than we do what the condition of slaves was in Greece as well as in Rome. He knows, too, that the "wild and guilty phantasy that man could hold property in man," lost nothing of its guilt or its wildness with the lapse of time and the changes of circumstances which overtook and affected those reciprocal relations. Every possibility of deterioration, every ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... called the princess's women, and after she had seen her get up, and begin dressing, went to the sultan's apartment, told him that her daughter had got some odd notions in her head, but that there was nothing in them but idle phantasy. ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... The phantasy passed, and now the golden gates of the palace of Baaltis rolled open before Elissa. Now, too, the priestesses bore her to the golden throne shaped like a crescent moon, and threw over her a black veil spangled with stars, symbol of the night. ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard
... he succeeds not in uniting these august figures with those of the vulgar world, or that high desire with the demands of the day, he resolves to let the actual pass current as the necessary, and declares that what has thus far seemed real to him is phantasy. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... special piece of work in his care and his considerateness for the general design. I think of Ben Jonson's experience of the greatest of all writers. "He was indeed honest, and of an open and free nature; had an excellent phantasy, brave notions and gentle expressions; wherein he flowed with that facility, that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped." Who it was that stopped him, and the ease of doing it, no one will doubt. Whether he, as well as the writer of later time, might not with more advantage ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... seen Euphra's face bending down close over his. — Could it be possible? Had Euphra herself come to see how he had fared? — The room lay in the grey light of the dawn, but Euphra was nowhere visible. Could she have vanished ashamed through the secret door? Or had she been only a phantasy, a projection outwards of the form that dwelt in his brain; a phenomenon often occurring when the last of sleeping and the first of waking are indistinguishably ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... other by the mere law of association. Because in such fantastic products of the imagination the various images appear in consciousness and combine themselves without any apparent control or purpose, the process is known as passive imagination, or phantasy. Such a type, it is evident, will have little significance as an ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... quality had been almost dormant—a sleeping beauty among the lively bevies of that literature's graces—ever since the Middle Ages, with some touches of waking—hardly more than motions in a dream—at the Renaissance. The comic Phantasy had been wakeful and active enough; the graver and more serious tragic Imagination had been, though with some limitations, busy at times. But this third sister—Our Lady of Dreams, one might call her in imitation of a famous fancy—had not shown herself much in French merriment or in French sadness: ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... tricks of gauze and gas. But Orange did not stop to consider this. It was enough and too much to see his "sad spirit of the elfin race" completely transformed. Was this the child-like, immature being of their strange visit to Miraflores? That whole episode seemed a kind of phantasy—a Midsummer Night's music—nothing more, perhaps something less. The very title of the play—The Second Surprise of Love—carried a mocking significance. Sometimes the soul speaks first, sometimes the senses first influence a life, but the turn, soon or late, must inevitably ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... dreamt last night our love return'd, And, sooth to say, that very dream Was sweeter in its phantasy, Than if for other hearts I burn'd, For eyes that ne'er like thine could beam In ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... a day I shall return to the discussion. I give you so long to change your mind and banish your phantasy; and in the meantime I remain your ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... their evolution and you realise your hopeless ignorance" (M., p. 11). If we cannot construct a "tree" for fowls, how absurd to adventure into the deeper recesses of Phylogeny. If all that Professor Bateson says is true, is not Driesch right when he speaks of "the phantasy christened Phylogeny"?[4] ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... Oh, for my phantasy's revealed first vision! Oh, for the baring of the beautiful Before me! Lo, the dusty, dark-brown land Changes into a Nymph's isle lily-white! The humble fisher lass upon the rock, Into Calypso of the shining hair, love-born! My heart, a traveller into a thousand Lands, thirsting ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... the Academics taught that nothing was certain, nothing was to be known ([Greek: katalepton]). For the Stoics themselves, their most determined opponents, defined the [Greek: kataleptike phantasia] (the phantasy or impression which involved knowledge[160a]) to be one that was capable of being produced by no object except that ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... the original form, though the papers were written for ladies, the phantasy of a definite 'Charlotte' as fair correspondent had not suggested itself to him; and that he had recourse to this only in the final rewriting, and would have applied it to the whole had he been spared to pursue his plan of recast and revision for the Collected Works, as it was ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... flash and glitter in our eyes. And then, to pique us further, she disappeared as suddenly and strangely as she had come. Who was she? Whence came she? What was the mystery surrounding her? Was she only a delicious dream, a haunting phantasy that we should never look upon again, never clasp again within our longing arms? Was our heart to be for ever hungry, haunted by the memory of—No, by heavens, she is real, and a woman. Here is her dear slipper, made surely to be kissed. Of a size too that a man may well wear within ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... he honoured "on this side idolatry as much as any." One of Jonson's remarks which seems to have lived longest on the lips of contemporaries was that Shakespeare "was indeed honest and [like his own Othello] of an open and free nature,[11] had an excellent phantasy, brave notions and gentle expressions, wherein he flowed with that facility that sometimes it was necessary ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... wilderness, Where tears are hung on every tree; For thus my gloomy phantasy Makes all things weep with me! Come let us sit and watch the sky, And fancy clouds, where no clouds be; Grief is enough to blot the eye, And make heaven black with misery. Why should birds sing such merry notes, Unless they were more blest than we? No ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... a coward and a rag?" cried Lichonin inwardly and wrung his hands. "What am I afraid of, before whom am I embarrassed? Have I not always prided myself upon being sole master of my life? Let's suppose, even, that the phantasy, the extravagance, of making a psychological experiment upon a human soul—a rare experiment, unsuccessful in ninety-nine percent—has entered my head. Is it possible that I must render anybody an account in this, or fear anybody's opinion? Lichonin! ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... early in his study, with bolted door. The boy must see to the shop to-day, no sublunary care of awl or leather, customers and groschen, must check the rushing flood of thought. The sunshine streams in emblem, to his high-raised phantasy, of a more glorious light. As he writes, the thin cheeks are flushed, the gray eye kindles, the whole frame is damp, and trembling with excitement. Sheet after sheet is covered. The headlong pen, too precipitate for calligraphy, for punctuation, for spelling, for syntax, ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... British Muse Deprive our schoolgirls of repose, The idols of their adoration A Vampire fond of meditation, Or Melmoth, gloomy wanderer he, The Eternal Jew or the Corsair Or the mysterious Sbogar.(33) Byron's capricious phantasy Could in romantic mantle drape ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... half believing the vision a phantasy of the brain; he had seen her face, white, frightened, agonized, yet it could not have been real. He tripped over the stone wall and half fell, but ran on, his mind in a turmoil, but certain some one was racing before him down the dark ravine. ...
— Molly McDonald - A Tale of the Old Frontier • Randall Parrish
... friendly guise, Or lay upon the moss by brook or tree, A noticeable Man with large grey eyes, And a pale face that seemed undoubtedly As if a blooming face it ought to be; Heavy his low-hung lip did oft appear, Deprest by weight of musing Phantasy; Profound his forehead was, though not severe; Yet some did think that he ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... deem That better than enough were more; Sure it were phantasy to dream With burdens to ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... This phantasy was probably suggested by the near proximity of the Governor's red roses, as Pearl stood outside of the window, together with her recollection of the prison rose-bush, which she ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... mere word. What is Heaven? A word—a phantasy. A vaporish place, too delicate and subtle for such fun-loving, corpulent specimens of the Creator's wisdom ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... I well that that fond phantasy Which made my soul the worshipper and thrall Of earthly art ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... is disastrous to the student of occult science. The possibility of gaining admission, by legitimate means, to the realms of the spiritual life must depend upon a careful exclusion of all superstition, phantasy, and dreaming. One who is pleased at having had a certain experience which cannot be grasped by human reason will not approach the spiritual world in the right manner. No partiality for the "inexplicable" will ever make one ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... only man. He not only wields an unlimited power over our mirth and our tears, over all the workings of passion, humor, thought, and observation, but he possesses also an infinite region full of the phantasy of fiction, of a horrifying and an amusing character. He possesses penetration both in the world of fiction and of reality, and above this reigns one and the same truthfulness to character and to nature, and the same spirit of humanity;" "To Shakespeare the epithet of Great comes of ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... sense of a bank, which has no dreams. You were to transform your vision into the actual, or find it vanish. When the commonplace cashier passed forth the coin, their jingle said to you, 'The supposed phantasy is real,' but the gold pieces themselves at that supreme moment meant no more to you than so many worthless counters, so you turned your ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... thoughts, which were as bright and clear as his life was dark and sad. In the gloom of the stern castles of Windsor and of Bolingbroke, in the Tower of London, side by side with his gaolers, he lived and moved in the world of phantasy of the Romance of the Rose. Venus, Cupid, Hope, Fair-Welcome, Pleasure, Pity, Danger, Sadness, Care, Melancholy, Sweet-Looks were around the desk, on which, in the deep embrasure of a window, beneath the sun's rays, he wrote his ballads, as delicate and fresh as an illumination ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... islands, they have risen from the depths of truth, and formed their broad surfaces above the ocean by the minutest accretions of persevering labor. The conceptions of Michael Angelo would have perished like a night's phantasy, had not his ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... told you that I will appoint you as minister only when you give me incontrovertible proofs that your conspiracies are not the fabric of your own phantasy." ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... all over again; and then, later on, when the dawn was breaking, sitting in the cold moonlight with a blanket flung about her, her wild hair tossing, and in her hand the revolver with which she had meant to destroy herself. Behold her, making sport of her own life-drama—turning into wildest phantasy her domestic ignominies, her inhibitions and her helpmate's blunderings; evoking the hosts of the future as to a festival, rehearsing the tragedy of her soul with all posterity as her audience. When once these mad steeds of her fancy were turned loose, one could never tell where their course ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... Phoebe, or the morning light Mixing and mingling with the dying night Makes shapes out of the darkness, and you see Some dream-remembered phantasy maybe. ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... the whole mystery, who had seemed to the boy to be spinning his very brain into dreams, rose, and, drawing near the bed, as if to finish the ruthless destruction, and with her long witch-broom sweep down the very cobwebs of his airy phantasy, said, ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... roused me from phantasy. The other half of the prison disgorged its inmates, and I could hear the sound of their tramping to the sanctuary. While they were engaged there I read a chapter of Gibbon; after which I heard the "miserable sinners" return from the chapel to ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... the particular trade, or industry, or corporation in which we have a share: the laws of trade will work out that survival of the fittest which is the only real righteousness, and if we survive that will prove that we are fit. Men tell us that all beyond this is phantasy, dreaming, Sunday-school politics: there is nothing worth living for except to get on in the world; and nothing at all worth dying for, since the ...
— The Americanism of Washington • Henry Van Dyke
... surer way to her own safety than ever her brain could have shown her. She came to him and, laying her hand on his shoulder, she said: 'The world and my heart lie at your feet, Eberhard, beloved. You are fighting with some wild phantasy, some spectre which exists only in your own mind. See, we share all things, let me share your sorrow. Is it only the loss of this letter which distresses you? Oh! tell me; surely you will not shut ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... speech played a part, because the dream work changed an imaginary situation into utter irrecognizability and complete inoffensiveness (while in a certain sense I behave in an unseemly way to the lady). The situation resulting in this phantasy is, however, nothing but a new edition of one that ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... his way, he experienced something of that feeling of exaltation that he had felt in the presence of his inexplicable lady-love. Had he not proof at least now that she was no dream or phantasy, and more than that, that she inhabited the same small land with him? These people knew her; nay (his mind worked quickly), was it not evident that she had been the link of connection between them and himself? She knew him, then—his ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... they not old Greek books for oracles which were written before the dawn of science! What are Gall and Spurzheim, Darwin and Wallace, Crookes and De Morgan, to professors who can fluently read Aristotle in Greek, and can tell how Plato proved that a table is not a table but only a mental phantasy! ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... darkness hide A Form not doubtfully descried:— Their transient mission o'er, O say to what blind region flee These Shapes of awful phantasy? To ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... that language is true and false, and that thought is the conversation of the soul with herself, and opinion is the end of thinking, and imagination or phantasy is the union of sense and opinion, the inference is that some of them, since they are akin to language, should have an element of falsehood ...
— Sophist • Plato
... say that Dante meant Theology By Beatrice, and not a mistress—I, Although my opinion may require apology, Deem this a commentator's phantasy, Unless indeed it was from his own knowledge he Decided thus, and showed good reason why; I think that Dante's more abstruse ecstatics Meant to ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... and form, is designed upon a scale much greater or much less than that of our general experience, produces upon the mind an effect of phantasy. ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... wherein he most faulted; and to justify mine own candour, for I loved the man, and do honour his memory on this side idolatry as much as any. He was, indeed, honest, and of an open and free nature, had an excellent phantasy, brave notions, and gentle expressions, wherein he flowed with that facility that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped. "Sufflaminandus erat," {47a} as Augustus said of Haterius. His wit was in his own power; would the rule of it had been so, too. Many times he fell into those things, ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... and appointed; on this occasion yet more precious stones and noble metals—among them gold of Ophir and Persian darics—are presented by David and the princes for the sacred building. The whole section 1Chronicles xxii.-xxix. is a startling instance of that statistical phantasy of the Jews which revels in vast sums of money on paper (xxii. 14), in artificial marshallings of names and numbers (xxiii.-xxvii.), in the enumeration of mere subjects without predicates, which simply stand on parade and neither signify nor ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... hush'd in sleep. Stretch'd on her couch The delegated Maiden lay: with toil Exhausted and sore anguish, soon she closed Her heavy eye-lids; not reposing then, For busy Phantasy, in other scenes Awakened. Whether that superior powers, By wise permission, prompt the midnight dream, Instructing so the passive [1] faculty; Or that the soul, escaped its fleshly clog, Flies free, ...
— Poems, 1799 • Robert Southey
... to whom Robert Trenholme, the master of the college at Chellaston, had written his letter; and she was thinking of that letter now, and of him, pondering much that, by some phantasy of dreams, she should have been suddenly reminded of him by the voice of the man who had passed through the car ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... phantasy, when I Essay to draw from all created things Deep, heartfelt, inward joy that closely clings; And trace in leaves and flowers that round me lie Lessons of love and earnest piety. 5 So let it be; and if the wide world rings In mock of this ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... excited the spirit of the Terrorists is impossible, for they were not given to the world until 1795. And in the second place, so far as Diderot's intention is concerned, any one who reads the piece from which the lines are taken, will perceive that the whole performance is in a vein of playful phantasy, and that the particular verses are placed dramatically in the mouth of a proclaimed Eleutheromane, or maniac for liberty.[203] Diderot was not likely to foresee that what he designed for an illustration of the frenzy ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... perhaps laugh at him for his pains; and he was too much afraid of her caprice to peril his adventure on this issue. A happy thought crossed his brain; he capered about his little chamber; and could hardly govern himself as the brilliant conception blazed forth on his imagination. This bright phantasy was to be embodied in the shape of a serenade. It would be more in the romantic way of making love—would stimulate her passions—powerfully enlist her feelings in his favour, and doubtless bring on something ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... who would offend the finer feelings of virtue and shock the delicacy of our manners. Every delineator of human character is placed in the same dilemma if he proposes to give a faithful picture of the world as it really is, and not an ideal phantasy, a mere creation of his own. It is the course of mortal things that the good should be shadowed by the bad, and virtue shine the brightest when contrasted with vice. Whoever proposes to discourage vice ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... most capital painter is the vivacity of the phantasy; the first and most capital poet is the inspiration that originally arises with the impulse of deep thought, or is set up by that, through the divine or akin-to-divine breath of which they feel themselves moved to the fit expression ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... to be considered is, whether friction demands a perfectly smooth surface. Undoubtedly a scientific work does, and a philosophical treatise should. When we ask for facts simply, we feel the intrusion of a style. Of fiction it is part. In the one case the classical robe, in the other any mediaeval phantasy of clothing." ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... heart, The master saw in him a vessel fit For righteousness, and bade him stay and learn His rules of grace that bring Nirvana's rest. And first of all the gracious master said: "This restless nature and this selfish world Is all a phantasy and empty show; Its life is lust, its end is pain and death. Waste not your time in speculations deep Of whence and why. One thing we surely know: Each living thing must have a living cause, And mind from mind and not from matter springs; While love, ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... my breast To speak the phantasy it feels, O take my heart to be thy guest, And stay ...
— The Minstrel - A Collection of Poems • Lennox Amott
... tiers of those high galleries with ladies, the space below with grooms and pages; the stage is ablaze with torches, and an Italian Masque, such as our Marlowe dreamed of, fills the scene. But it is impossible to dower these fancies with even such life as in healthier, happier ruins phantasy may lend to imagination's figments. This theatre is like a maniac's skull, empty of all but unrealities and mockeries of things that are. The ghosts we raise here could never have been living men and women: questi sciaurati non fur mai vivi. So clinging is the sense of ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... thought, apprehension, impression, perception, image, [Grk], sentiment, reflection, observation, consideration; abstract idea; archetype, formative notion; guiding conception, organizing conception; image in the mind, regulative principle. view &c. (opinion) 484; theory &c. 514; conceit, fancy; phantasy &c. (imagination) 515.point of view &c. (aspect) 448; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... strange, therefore, that Winter had no sooner opened the door of No. 17 than the novice of the party became aware of a heavy, pungent scent which he associated with some affrighting and unclean thing. At first he swept aside the phantasy. Strong as he was, his nervous system had been subjected to severe strain that evening. He knew well that the mind can create its own specters, that the five senses can be subjugated by forces which science has not as yet ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... Indulge the beggar and the dogs at last: Say, friend, is it benevolence of soul, Or pompous vanity, that prompts the whole? 140 These sons of sloth, who by profusion thrive, His pride inveigled from the public hive: And numbers pine in solitary woe, Who furnish'd out this phantasy of show. When silent misery assail'd his eyes, Did e'er his throbbing bosom sympathise? Or his extensive charity pervade To those who languish in the barren shade, Where oft, by want and modesty suppress'd, The ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... most high-flown thoughts concerning glory and immortality, should not, on such a night, make himself an oak-wreath. In the day time, to be sure, an occupation of that sort would not look very well, but night is the realm of phantasy and the wreath is the emblem of glory. Then, too, I find that this first scene—the naturalness of which I hope I have proved—is of deep significance for the play. In order to explain psychologically the Prince's ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... Comedy was at first as a dream to me, one of those impossible projects which we caress and then let fly; a chimera that gives us a glimpse of its smiling woman's face, and forthwith spreads its wings and returns to a heavenly realm of phantasy. But this chimera, like many another, has become a reality; has its behests, its tyranny, ...
— The Human Comedy - Introductions and Appendix • Honore de Balzac
... the observer than when the blaze of high noon exposes all of its unyielding harshness. To the feeling of desolation which comes over one in such a region as this a quickened sense and apprehension of the supernatural are added, and we seem to be invaders of a border-land between the solid earth and phantasy. Nature is distraught; and so much has man subordinated and possessed her elsewhere that here, where existence is defeated by the absolute impossibility of sustenance, a poignant feeling of her imperfection steals over us and weighs ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... consolations," I replied, "since the mindless do not suffer. But if such is the case, how do you account for what you and poor Savage saw that night in the Town of the Child? It was not altogether a phantasy, for the dress you described was the same we saw her wearing at ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... of phantasy was given to the whole affair when, two hours later, she met Carroll, soiled and grimy, coming across the plaza, smoking—he, the addict to thirty-cent Havanas!—an awful native cheroot, whose incense spread desolation about him. Further and more ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... of painful thought floated the broken gleams of a golden phantasy, the rainbow-coloured memories of a secret love. They came like a light upon the darkened waves, yet a light too feeble to dissipate the under gloom. Like the phosphorescent flashes in the sea at midnight, which the lonely voyager, watching ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... actually be continu'd, without Interruption. So he was very intent for a time upon that Being; but he could not stay there long, before some sensible Object or other would present itself, either the Voice of some wild Beast would reach his Ears, or some Phantasy affected his Imagination; or he was touch'd with some Pain in some Part or other; or he was hungry, or dry, or too cold, or too hot, or was forc'd to rise to ease Nature. So that his Contemplation was interrupted, and he remov'd from that State of Mind: And then he could not, without a great ...
— The Improvement of Human Reason - Exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn Yokdhan • Ibn Tufail
... solid-seeming World, after all, were but an air-image, our ME the only reality: and Nature, with its thousandfold production and destruction, but the reflex of our own inward Force, the "phantasy of our Dream"; or what the Earth-Spirit in Faust names it, the living visible ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... the errant phantasy, No more by sense imprisoned, Creates what possibly might be But actually isn't: And this my tale is past belief, Of truth and reason emptied, 'Tis fiction manifest—in brief I was ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley
... he had heard what the count had to say, it was clearly his duty to reason with him. Who could tell that he might not yield to such a process? He avowed that he was deeply enamored of Enrica—a man in love is already half vanquished. Why should Marescotti throw away his chance of happiness for a phantasy—a mere dream? There was no real obstacle. He was versatile and visionary, but the very soul of honor. How, if he—Trenta—could bring Marescotti to see how much it would be to Enrica's advantage that he should transplant her from a dreary home, to ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot |
